Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. [1] [2] [3] The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell's Islands of Space in the November issue of Astounding Science Fiction . [4] [5] [1] The complementary term soft science fiction, formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the "hard" (natural) and "soft" (social) sciences, [6] first appeared in the late 1970s. Though there are examples generally considered as "hard" science fiction such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, built on mathematical sociology, [7] science fiction critic Gary Westfahl argues that while neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy, they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful. [8]
Stories revolving around scientific and technical consistency were written as early as the 1870s with the publication of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas in 1870, among other stories. The attention to detail in Verne's work became an inspiration for many future scientists and explorers, although Verne himself denied writing as a scientist or seriously predicting machines and technology of the future.[ citation needed ]
Hugo Gernsback believed from the beginning of his involvement with science fiction in the 1920s that the stories should be instructive, [10] although it was not long before he found it necessary to print fantastical and unscientific fiction in Amazing Stories to attract readers. [11] During Gernsback's long absence from science fiction (SF) publishing, from 1936 to 1953, the field evolved away from his focus on facts and education. [12] [13] The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered to have started in the late 1930s and lasted until the mid-1940s, bringing with it "a quantum jump in quality, perhaps the greatest in the history of the genre", according to science fiction historians Peter Nicholls and Mike Ashley. [14]
However, Gernsback's views were unchanged. In his editorial in the first issue of Science-Fiction Plus , he gave his view of the modern SF story: "the fairy tale brand, the weird or fantastic type of what mistakenly masquerades under the name of Science-Fiction today!" and he stated his preference for "truly scientific, prophetic Science-Fiction with the full accent on SCIENCE". [13] In the same editorial, Gernsback called for patent reform to give science fiction authors the right to create patents for ideas without having patent models because many of their ideas predated the technical progress needed to develop specifications for their ideas. The introduction referenced the numerous prescient technologies described throughout Ralph 124C 41+ . [15]
The heart of the "hard science fiction" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself. [16] One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically or theoretically possible. For example, the development of concrete proposals for spaceships, space stations, space missions, and a US space program in the 1950s and 1960s influenced a widespread proliferation of "hard" space stories. [17] Later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label of hard SF, as evidenced by P. Schuyler Miller, who called Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust hard SF, [4] and the designation remains valid even though a crucial plot element, the existence of deep pockets of "moondust" in lunar craters, is now known to be incorrect.
There is a degree of flexibility in how far from "real science" a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF. [18] Hard science fiction authors only include more controversial devices when the ideas draw from well-known scientific and mathematical principles. In contrast, authors writing softer SF use such devices without a scientific basis (sometimes referred to as "enabling devices", since they allow the story to take place). [19]
Readers of "hard SF" often try to find inaccuracies in stories. For example, a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high school class calculated that in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld the topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years. [8] Niven fixed these errors in his sequel The Ringworld Engineers , and noted them in the foreword.
Films set in outer space that aspire to the hard SF label try to minimize the artistic liberties taken for the sake of practicality of effect. Such considerations to be made when shooting may include:
Arranged chronologically by publication year.
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
If was an American science fiction magazine launched in March 1952 by Quinn Publications, owned by James L. Quinn.
Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction and military fiction that depicts the use of science fiction technology, including spaceships and weapons, for military purposes and usually principal characters who are members of a military organization, usually during a war; occurring sometimes in outer space or on a different planet or planets. It exists in a range of media, including literature, comics, film, television and video games.
"The Cold Equations" is a science fiction short story by American writer Tom Godwin (1915–1980), first published in Astounding Magazine in August 1954. In 1970, the Science Fiction Writers of America selected it as one of the best science-fiction short stories published before 1965, and it was therefore included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964. It has been widely anthologized and dramatized.
Planet Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House between 1939 and 1955. It featured interplanetary adventures, both in space and on some other planets, and was initially focused on a young readership. Malcolm Reiss was editor or editor-in-chief for all of its 71 issues. Planet Stories was launched at the same time as Planet Comics, the success of which probably helped to fund the early issues of Planet Stories. Planet Stories did not pay well enough to regularly attract the leading science fiction writers of the day, but occasionally obtained work from well-known authors, including Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak. In 1952 Planet Stories published Philip K. Dick's first sale, and printed four more of his stories over the next three years.
Wonder Stories was an early American science fiction magazine which was published under several titles from 1929 to 1955. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1929 after he had lost control of his first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, when his media company Experimenter Publishing went bankrupt. Within a few months of the bankruptcy, Gernsback launched three new magazines: Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Science Wonder Quarterly.
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Asteroids have appeared in fiction since at least the late 1800s, the first one—Ceres—having been discovered in 1801. They were initially only used infrequently as writers preferred the planets as settings. The once-popular Phaëton hypothesis, which states that the asteroid belt consists of the remnants of the former fifth planet that existed in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter before somehow being destroyed, has been a recurring theme with various explanations for the planet's destruction proposed. This hypothetical former planet is in science fiction often called "Bodia" in reference to Johann Elert Bode, for whom the since-discredited Titius–Bode law that predicts the planet's existence is named.
A sense of wonder is an intellectual and emotional state frequently invoked in discussions of science and biology, higher consciousness, science fiction, and philosophy.
Uranus has been used as a setting in works of fiction since shortly after its 1781 discovery, albeit infrequently. The earliest depictions portrayed it as having a solid surface, whereas later stories portrayed it more accurately as a gaseous planet. Its moons have also appeared in a handful of works. Both the planet and its moons have experienced a slight trend of increased representation in fiction over time.
Planets outside of the Solar System have appeared in fiction since at least the 1850s, long before the first real ones were discovered in the 1990s. Most of these fictional planets do not differ significantly from the Earth, and serve only as settings for the narrative. The majority host native lifeforms, sometimes with humans integrated into the ecosystems. Fictional planets that are not Earth-like vary in many different ways. They may have significantly stronger or weaker gravity on their surfaces, or have a particularly hot or cold climate. Both desert planets and ocean planets appear, as do planets with unusual chemical conditions. Various peculiar planetary shapes have been depicted, including flattened, cubic, and toroidal. Some fictional planets exist in multiple-star systems where the orbital mechanics can lead to exotic day–night or seasonal cycles, while others do not orbit any star at all. More fancifully, planets are occasionally portrayed as having sentience, though this is less common than stars receiving the same treatment or a planet's lifeforms having a collective consciousness.
Kathryn Elizabeth Cramer is an American science fiction writer, editor, and literary critic.
Science Fiction Quarterly was an American pulp science fiction magazine that was published from 1940 to 1943 and again from 1951 to 1958. Charles Hornig served as editor for the first two issues; Robert A. W. Lowndes edited the remainder. Science Fiction Quarterly was launched by publisher Louis Silberkleit during a boom in science fiction magazines at the end of the 1930s. Silberkleit launched two other science fiction titles at about the same time: all three ceased publication before the end of World War II, falling prey to slow sales and paper shortages. In 1950 and 1951, as the market improved, Silberkleit relaunched Future Fiction and Science Fiction Quarterly. By the time Science Fiction Quarterly ceased publication in 1958, it was the last surviving science fiction pulp magazine, all other survivors having changed to different formats.
The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF is a definitive 1994 anthology of hard science fiction (sf) short stories compiled by the award-winning editing team of David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. This 990-page book includes 68 stories, each prefaced by a brief note to describe facts about the author, related works, or the logic of the story's inclusion in the genre. In addition, the book opens with three essays about the meaning and the boundaries of hard science fiction. The editors further explored these issues in The Hard SF Renaissance (2002).
Soft science fiction, or soft SF, is a category of science fiction with two different definitions, in contrast to hard science fiction. It explores the "soft" sciences, as opposed to the "hard" sciences. It can also refer to science fiction which prioritizes human emotions over scientific accuracy or plausibility.
Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies. The term does not refer to opera music, but instead originally referred to the melodrama, scope, and formulaic stories of operas, much as used in "horse opera", a 1930s phrase for a clichéd and formulaic Western film, and "soap opera", a melodramatic domestic drama. Space operas emerged in the 1930s and continue to be produced in literature, film, comics, television, video games and board games.
Scientific Detective Monthly was a pulp magazine that published fifteen issues beginning in January 1930. It was launched by Hugo Gernsback as part of his second venture into science-fiction magazine publishing, and was intended to focus on detective and mystery stories with a scientific element. Many of the stories involved contemporary science without any imaginative elements—for example, a story in the first issue turned on the use of a bolometer to detect a black girl blushing—but there were also one or two science fiction stories in every issue.
Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.
Space travel, or space flight is a science fiction theme that has captivated the public and is almost archetypal for science fiction. Space travel, interplanetary or interstellar, is usually performed in space ships, and spacecraft propulsion in various works ranges from the scientifically plausible to the totally fictitious.
Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s.
hard science fiction ... the term was first used by P. Schuyler Miller in 1957
Earliest cite: P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding Science Fiction ... he called A Fall of Moondust "hard" science fiction
Soft science fiction, probably a back-formation from Hard Science Fiction)
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(help)The novel 'The Invincible' can certainly be classed as one of Stanislaw Lem's most important works. It is also a rather special novel in his oeuvre - falling into the hard science fiction genre, where there is a strong emphasis on science and technology issues.
PROS: Wonderful "hard" sci-fi setting
[...] Reynolds and his team worked tirelessly to imbue every inch of their game with the cool, atmospheric melancholy so dear to hard sci-fi.